Robot Fish to monitor Water Pollution

Marine life is tottering under the heavy burden of toxic waste, which as a result of rapid industrialization is being released into seas and rivers all over the world. Researchers at the University of Essex are working on a new robot, which will be equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out pollutants present in water bodies and relay them to their control centers.



The robots will mimic the movement of fish and as they find possible areas of contamination, they will relay the location to other robots in their vicinity using Wi-Fi. Completely autonomous, the robots will have artificial intelligent software that will enable them to navigate on their own. Using GPS, the robots can also return to the control center to deliver information and also recharge their batteries.

The robots will be released in groups, where each group will consist of five fish robots. For now the robots will be set off free in Thames, where they will produce a 3D pollution map, if the tests are successful, they could be used worldwide.

Source: Dailymail

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Explore the sky a little closer with this

Meade are a well known name in consumer telescopes, recognised for using computer technology to make telescopes easier to use.

That technology reaches a peak in the new ETX-LS, which combines GPS and optical sensing technology to optimally align itself in 3 minutes, anywhere on the planet.

Once you’re looking at an object in the sky the telescope will work out what you’re looking at and if it knows about it, give you information through the built in speaker. It will even present related video on a connected TV.

For the uninitiated, here’s why auto alignment is cool: we are sitting on a ball of rock moving through space and spinning at 1000MPH. If you try to use a telescope to look at the sky you’ll find that it very quickly moves (remember we’re spinning) and you have to readjust the telescope to keep the sky still.

Motorised telescopes can do this adjustment automatically but they need to be told where they are on the earth so that they can work out which direction to move in.

So the ETX-LS can work out where it is automatically using GPS, fine tune itself by recognising the sky, find anything you want to look at automatically, keep track of it for as long as it’s over the horizon and also (if it’s a well known object) tell you something about it. Pretty neat!

Source: Meade

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Facebook under koobface attack

Researchers say that the 'Koobface' worm - which has been circulating through the popular social networking service, Facebook - is still on the loose, despite Facebook's efforts of cleaning up the mess.

Craig Schmugar, a threat researcher at McAfee Inc, was one of the first security researchers to notice Koobface's spread on Wednesday, and notify Facebook. This attack on the world's most popular social networking site, and its 120 million users, came within weeks of Facebook winning an $873 million lawsuit against people accused of hacking user accounts and spreading spam.

Schmugar said Koobface is a variant of one that hit MySpace, last August. Though the earlier version targeted both MySpace and Facebook, the new one has focused only on the latter. There are more than two dozen variants of the worm in circulation.

Koobface generates spammed links that lead to various compromised host sites, which appear to serve a video. The user receives a fake error message, saying that the version of Adobe Flash installed on his or her computer is out of date, thereby prompting the download of an update.

The update is malicious software that can easily by changed by those behind the attacks to exploit any of a variety of security vulnerabilities. At the moment, it installs a proxy server called tinyproxy. exe and a service called Security Accounts Manager that loads the proxy server at startup. According to Schmugar, the server listens on TCP port 9090 and scans all HTTP traffic to intercept search results for the purpose of ad hijacking and click fraud.

Acknowledging the worm's attack, Facebook has posted a short message on its security page. The instructions urge users, whose accounts had already been compromised, to remove the 'Koobface' virus thus: 'give your computer an antivirus scrub-down and change your Facebook password'.

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Coffee Mug with a message

What looks like an ordinary coffee mug actually will show us the impact of global warming.

Still many people doesn't know the consequence of a global warming and for those kind of people this mug will be perfect. Because this mug actually shows the result of global warming when you pour hot coffee or tea. As soon as you pour some hot drinks in the mug you could see the land masses around the mug disappear in a jiffy,

Which refers to that Oceans start to spread across the coastlines as ice caps melt and water levels rise. This mug was designed to make people aware of the global warming. It really is the ideal cautionary gift for eco-unfriendly tea/coffee drinkers everywhere

Source: Firebox

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